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Transformers are the mainstream of NLP applications and are becoming increasingly popular in other domains such as Computer Vision. Despite the improvements in model quality, the enormous computation costs make Transformers difficult at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-22 Liu Liu , Zheng Qu , Zhaodong Chen , Yufei Ding , Yuan Xie

Multi-headed Attention's (MHA) quadratic compute and linearly growing KV-cache make long-context transformers expensive to train and serve. Prior works such as Grouped Query Attention (GQA) and Multi-Latent Attention (MLA) shrink the cache,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Tomas Figliolia , Nicholas Alonso , Rishi Iyer , Quentin Anthony , Beren Millidge

As large language models (LLMs) continue to support increasingly longer contexts, the memory demand for key-value (KV) caches during decoding grows rapidly, becoming a critical bottleneck in both GPU memory capacity and PCIe bandwidth.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Feiyu Yao , Qian Wang

Large language models face significant cost challenges in long-sequence inference. To address this, reusing historical Key-Value (KV) Cache for improved inference efficiency has become a mainstream approach. Recent advances further enhance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Ziyi Cao , Qingyi Si , Jingbin Zhang , Bingquan Liu

Long-context inference in large language models (LLMs) is increasingly constrained by the KV cache bottleneck: memory usage grows linearly with sequence length, while attention computation scales quadratically. Existing approaches address…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Huanxuan Liao , Yixing Xu , Shizhu He , Guanchen Li , Xuanwu Yin , Dong Li , Emad Barsoum , Jun Zhao , Kang Liu

The quadratic complexity of attention remains the central bottleneck in long-context inference for large language models. Prior acceleration methods either sparsify the attention map with structured patterns or permanently evict tokens at…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Dongwon Jo , Beomseok Kang , Jiwon Song , Jae-Joon Kim

Despite the efficacy of network sparsity in alleviating the deployment strain of Large Language Models (LLMs), it endures significant performance degradation. Applying Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to fine-tune the sparse LLMs offers an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Weizhong Huang , Yuxin Zhang , Xiawu Zheng , Yang Liu , Jing Lin , Yiwu Yao , Rongrong Ji

Long-context understanding is crucial for many NLP applications, yet transformers struggle with efficiency due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. Sparse attention methods alleviate this cost but often impose static, predefined…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Hanzhi Zhang , Heng Fan , Kewei Sha , Yan Huang , Yunhe Feng

Sparse attention reduces the quadratic complexity of full self-attention but faces two challenges: (1) an attention gap, where applying sparse attention to full-attention-trained models causes performance degradation due to train-inference…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Zhenyi Shen , Junru Lu , Lin Gui , Jiazheng Li , Yulan He , Di Yin , Xing Sun

In long-context large language model (LLM) inference, the prefill stage dominates computation due to self-attention over the complete input context. Sparse attention significantly reduces self-attention computation by limiting each token's…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Rakshith Jayanth , Viktor Prasanna

Long-context agentic workflows have emerged as a defining use case for large language models, making attention efficiency critical for both inference speed and serving cost. Sparse attention addresses this challenge effectively, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Yushi Bai , Qian Dong , Ting Jiang , Xin Lv , Zhengxiao Du , Aohan Zeng , Jie Tang , Juanzi Li

The Transformer architecture, underpinned by the Multi-Head Attention (MHA) mechanism, has become the de facto standard for state-of-the-art models in artificial intelligence. However, the quadratic computational complexity of MHA with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Adam Filipek

Many advanced Large Language Model (LLM) applications require long-context processing, but the self-attention module becomes a bottleneck during the prefilling stage of inference due to its quadratic time complexity with respect to sequence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Xiaodong Ji , Hailin Zhang , Fangcheng Fu , Bin Cui

LLM decoding is bottlenecked for large batches and long contexts by loading the key-value (KV) cache from high-bandwidth memory, which inflates per-token latency, while the sequential nature of decoding limits parallelism. We analyze the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Ted Zadouri , Hubert Strauss , Tri Dao

Long-context Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) that incorporate long text-image and text-video modalities, demand substantial resources as their multimodal Key-Value (KV) caches grow with increasing input lengths, challenging…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-14 Zhongwei Wan , Hui Shen , Xin Wang , Che Liu , Zheda Mai , Mi Zhang

In Large Language Model (LLM) inference, Key-Value (KV) caches (KV-caches) are essential for reducing time complexity. However, they result in a linear increase in GPU memory as the context length grows. While recent work explores KV-cache…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Ahmed Burak Gulhan , Krishna Teja Chitty-Venkata , Murali Emani , Mahmut Kandemir , Venkatram Vishwanath

The quadratic computational complexity of the standard attention mechanism constitutes a fundamental bottleneck for large language models in long-context inference. While existing KV cache compression methods alleviate memory pressure, they…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Jinyu Guo , Zhihan Zhang , Jiehui Xie , Md. Tamim Iqbal , Dongshen Han , Lik-Hang Lee , Sung-Ho Bae , Jie Zou , Yang Yang , Chaoning Zhang

Large Language Models capable of handling extended contexts are in high demand, yet their inference remains challenging due to substantial Key-Value cache size and high memory bandwidth requirements. Previous research has demonstrated that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Junlin Mu , Hantao Huang , Jihang Zhang , Minghui Yu , Tao Wang , Yidong Li

The quadratic computational complexity of standard attention mechanisms presents a severe scalability bottleneck for LLMs in long-context scenarios. While hybrid attention mechanisms combining Full Attention (FA) and Sparse Attention (SA)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Quantong Qiu , Zhiyi Hong , Yi Yang , Haitian Wang , Kebin Liu , Qingqing Dang , Juntao Li , Min Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable potential in processing long sequences and complex reasoning tasks, yet efficiently serving these models remains challenging due to the quadratic computational complexity of attention in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Shang Yang , Junxian Guo , Haotian Tang , Qinghao Hu , Guangxuan Xiao , Jiaming Tang , Yujun Lin , Zhijian Liu , Yao Lu , Song Han